Page 79

Dimitry

London, England

“ I t’s bloody cold.” Pete Chalmers hunches his shoulders inside a heavy sheepskin jacket and eyes the sullen mist over the Thames balefully. “I’d say the convicts sent to Australia got the better end of the deal.”

I chuckle. “Probably true.” I nod to a pub on the corner. “I can’t imagine the dress fitting is going to be a quick one. Fancy a pint?”

His eyes brighten. “First good idea I’ve heard since the word wedding was mentioned.”

We take a seat in the dim pub and order two pints, sitting in companionable silence for a while, just watching the midday crowd mill through the Kensington streets.

“Good thing you’re having this wedding in Australia,” Pete says eventually. “And plan to live in Spain.” His eyes catch mine in the mirror behind the bar. “At least the weather is decent over there. ”

I hold his eyes. “You’re okay with us staying in Spain, then?” I take a mouthful of Guinness. “I thought Suze might... Well, Australia is Abby’s home.”

He shakes his head with a rueful smile. “Hasn’t been Abby’s home in a long while, Dimitry.

Can’t imagine it ever will be again. Maybe for a visit or two.

But she belongs on this side of the pond.

Even I can see that.” He gives me sideways look.

“And she belongs with you, mate.” He raises his pint to me. “God help her.”

I laugh quietly as we clink glasses.

“Besides,” Pete goes on, “Suze was always on at me about traveling. Now that she’s got the mother of all excuses, I predict we’ll be regular visitors. So you don’t get off that lightly.”

“You’re welcome anytime. Although I have to warn you, between the renovations and Darya’s baby, it’s not overly peaceful.”

“Ah.” He claps me on the shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll have some of your own soon enough. Then you’ll really know the meaning of the word peace . Which is to say, you’ll never have any.”

I laugh, tilting my glass to the mirror. “Something to look forward to.”

“So you’ve opened a gallery, huh?” Pete gives me a quizzical look. “Never picked you for the arty type, to be honest. Then again, I guess you had to put that unholy haul you took out of Myanmar somewhere.”

I laugh into my beer. “You saw my father’s art dealership yesterday, just around the corner?”

He nods.

“Well, I’m opening up a second branch. We’ll run auctions, too, and exhibit new artists.” I grin. “Like your daughter, for example. ”

Pete tilts his head, but he still looks skeptical. “And that’s it, huh? You’re just going to be selling art to rich people?”

I grimace around my pint, avoiding his eyes. “Well. More or less.”

He snorts into his pint. “More or less.” He nods. “Right,” he says, in a voice heavily laced with sarcasm.

I roll my eyes. “There’s really no point fucking with you, Pete, is there?”

“After Myanmar?” He raises his glass at me. “No. Not really.”

I can’t help but laugh. I glance along the bar, but it’s entirely empty, the barman off talking to the chef at the other end of the room.

“Turns out, there’s a lot of interesting people involved in the rare art black market,” I say in a low voice.

“The kind of people who move between governments, borders, and businesses relatively unseen. My father has spent a lot of years becoming... a kind of hub within that community.” I shrug.

“You might say he deals as much in secrets as he does in art. Sometimes, those secrets are more valuable than the art he sells.”

“Ha.” He nods slowly. “To be honest, I kind of figured as much. Your father didn’t really strike me as the arty type either.”

I glance at him. “I’ll keep Abby out of that end of the business,” I say quietly. “She’ll be safe, Pete. You have my word.”

He clasps my shoulder briefly. “I know that, mate.”

We drink the rest of our pints, then order two more.

Pete nods at my phone. “Why don’t you call your father, ask him to join us?”

I tense slightly. “Oh, he doesn’t close for a few hours yet.”

“Right.” His eyes narrow. “Pretty sure he’d be happy to close early, if you rang.”

Christ. Not you too .

Abby has been dropping more than a few idle hints lately, about how Leon and I need to have what she diplomatically terms a proper conversation .

“You know, you Russians are a lot like Australians,” Pete goes on when I don’t answer.

“Since I’ve been here, I’ve met your mate Roman, and that smooth prick Mak, as well as your father.

You all love a drink and a story. But when it comes to the shit that matters, you’re buttoned up tighter than a bloody priest.” He swallows a mouthful of his pint.

“Do you know why Suze and I are over here?”

I lift a shoulder. “I don’t know, Pete. Seeing the world in your old age?”

“Yeah, well. You’d think that would be it, wouldn’t you.” His eyes in the mirror are suddenly somber. “Truth is, it came down to a fight with my son—over a bloody hay baler, of all things.”

He shakes his head when I smile.

“All these years,” he says quietly, “I always thought Jamie was happy. Then the baler broke down. I was pissed off, obviously. Ripped him a new one for not getting it looked at earlier. Next thing I knew, my boy had laid me out.”

He smiles ruefully, rubbing his jaw. “Knocked me so hard I saw stars for days. Turns out, he’d asked me at least a dozen times to get someone out to look at it, but I’d just ignored him.

Tried to fix it myself, whatever. Point is, I didn’t actually hear him.

And what he’d really been trying to say for years was that he was more than ready to take over running the farm.

He was just waiting for me to offer it to him, but I never did. ”

He meets my eyes in the mirror. “You and your father are opening a business together. He’s coming to your wedding. You get together and talk about business. But from what I can tell, you don’t talk about anything else, despite you spending every other week in London. ”

I scowl. “Sounds like you two did a lot of talking, for two men who hardly know each other.”

“Well, we’re about to be family. That has a funny way of breaking down barriers.

And we’ve both got sons who are stubborn as Mallee bulls, so that helped, too.

” Pete pushes the phone across to me. “Call him. I’ll take myself out for a walk.

” He downs his pint. “Try to enjoy all this culture my wife keeps dragging me out to see.”

He claps me on the shoulder, then leaves without waiting for a reply.

I stare at my phone for a good five minutes.

Pete’s right, and I know it.

Leon and I get along as well as we did that first dinner. We’ve spent hours together working out how our business will work and talking about the future.

And amid all that, never once have we discussed our shared past.

I take a deep breath and punch his number.

“Hey,” I say when he answers. “It’s me. I was thinking—are you free for lunch?”

“We can eat afterward, if you want,” Leon says. “But some things are better talked about in the open air, where nobody is listening.”

We’re walking through Hyde Park, where the mist still lies low over the water despite it being early afternoon and well into spring.

Fucking London weather. Thank Christ Abby and I will be living in Spain.

“How did you know it was that kind of conversation?” I give him a curious sidelong glance .

He smiles wryly. “You’ve come to the gallery to talk business. You’ve invited me out with Mak and Roman. You’ve never once asked me out for lunch.”

I feel a twist of shame.

“I understand it,” Leon says quietly. “To be frank, I’m not sure I felt like talking either. I... needed a minute, after Myanmar.”

Yeah.

We all did.

It was weeks before Abby stopped waking up drenched in sweat, and even longer until the hunted look began fading from her eyes.

“Maybe we should start with how Jacob and I met,” he says.

“I guess we could start there,” I say slowly, though that isn’t what I meant.

“It’s connected to Ekaterina.” Leon picks up on my tone.

“Jacob— Yakov —was your mother’s brother.

By marriage, I mean,” he adds hastily, seeing the look of revulsion on my face.

“His parents adopted Ekaterina when she was ten. Her parents had been imprisoned in Russia, for political reasons. It happened a lot back then. This was in the early eighties, you understand, before Gorbachev and the dissolution of the USSR. Russia was still in the stranglehold of the KGB, and your mother’s parents were more outspoken than they should have been.

She never saw them again, after they were taken.

She was placed with the Chazov’s, a good military family, loyal to the state. Jacob was still Yakov back then.”

I shiver involuntarily at the name.

Leon pulls a leaf from a branch with more force than necessary, tearing it methodically between his fingers as we walk.

“Your mother, Yakov, and I were raised on the same military base, basically next door to one another. We played together as kids, went to the same dances as teenagers.” He half smiles. “Listened to the same bad, smuggled recordings of Western pop music when our parents were out.

“Yakov and I entered the army at the same time. Your mother was still in school when we went away for basic training. Up until then, we’d all been just friends.”

His smile fades, and he takes a deep breath.

“Then Yakov’s parents died in a car crash.

It was a terrible tragedy, obviously. And it changed Yakov.

Not for the better. He became... possessive of your mother.

And increasingly annoyed at my presence, despite the fact that we’d been best friends our entire lives.

It wasn’t until your mother was eighteen that she ran to my house in the middle of the night, and I realized why he’d changed so much. ”

“God,” I mutter, my stomach churning. “That sick bastard. He was raping her—even then?”

“Not then, no. But he was in love with her.” His face tightens. “Your mother didn’t return his affections, obviously.”